Linux for Suits - Picking New Fights

Although it's easy to point to the exemplary successes of Linux-built
giants such as Google and Amazon, it's just as easy to overlook the degree
to which the practical value system behind Linux development has become
the default approach to networked progress.

Yet even as Linux and the LAMP+ stack have become standard building
materials, there's nothing to stop them from being used in service of a
proprietary mentality that seeks to lock in customers, lock out
competition and lock down markets. As Steven Hodson puts it
(www.winextra.com/?p=354):

Many would like to believe that the
best and strongest weapon against the old guard of technology is the
Open Source movement, but what they don't see is that they have already
been co-opted and have just become another way to make money. While the
roots of the OSM (Open Source movement) may still technically be free to
all, the old guard is quickly locking up parts of it with service
contracts and corporate licensing.

It's still customary for VCs to ask their potential portfolio companies,
“What's your lock-in?” This is an Industrial Age mentality that needs to
be exposed as a value-subtracting anachronism in a world where creation
and choice yield abundances that can be put to countless productive
uses. You should want to build goods and provide services that customers
choose freely. You should keep customers because they want to stay, not
because you've trapped them in a silo.

Even Steve Jobs this year came out and said the record industry would be
better off without DRM. That's because he's no less trapped than any of
his customers.

The protagonist here is nothing less than the cause of freedom, which
will never be old Gnus. (Pun intended.) The problem here—the
enemy—is a mentality that's as old as the Industrial Age.

The battle for freedom, of course, is one we've been fighting all along.
The difference now is that the logic of lockup is more and more
exposed, and its flaws are more and more evident—though not yet widely
obvious.

The fight, then, will shift from ideals to practical matters. How do you
make money by building with free stuff and putting it to use, rather
than just by selling it? How is software more useful and important as it
becomes less and less of an industry? How do you get more work done, and
become more valuable as a contributor because you're working with free
and open goods?

These are still new questions, even though Linux
Journal has been a
living answer to all of them since 1994.

What's Your Story?

So now the question goes to the floor. What are the Good Fights you want
to read about in Linux Journal? You tell us. Write to
ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He is
also a Visiting
Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Fellow
with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.